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[Japo]

With my older machine I had a DOS 6.22 partition, while Windows 98 in the main partition. Some games worked in 6.22 and not so "rebooting in DOS mode" with Win98 (i.e. DOS 7.1). For example Star Control II, Crusader: No Remorse, Fields of Glory, Lords of the Realm, Syndicate, and many more. So I'd choose 6.22, it was designed with compatibility in mind and 7.1 wasn't. No idea about FreeDOS, but I'd still bet that 6.22 is the most compatible with games designed for DOS 6 and lower.

[The Fifth Horseman]

I'll be experimenting with both 6.22 and 7.1 using multi-boot, shortly.

[duckpatch]

I'm going to dual boot FreeDOS and Win98, both installed on a 500meg drive and then the games will be plunked on a second hard drive. Sounds like a plan.

[liamoneal13]

It's 6.22 all the way guys. If you have Win98 you have DOS 7 as part of it. I don't know FreeDOS though.

[The Fifth Horseman]

Buddy, this thread has pretty much finished a year ago.
Please don't raise the dead.

[sev7en]

There's also DRDOS but I suggest you to use the original MS' MS-DOS v6.22.

[GTX2GvO]

Well...

With dos 6.22 you're limited to FAT16 partitions with a max. size of 2GB. (of the partition that is)
With dos 7 you can use FAT32 with it's respective partition limit. (don't know this one)

I DO know there BOTH not capable of even seeing NTFS partitions.
So... Check your file system before you choose your dos.

I didn't knew there were any other differences between these two versions, exept for 'code improvements'.

[Japo]

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(GTX2GvO @ May 26 2007, 11:03 PM) [snapback]291480[/snapback]</div>

I didn't knew there were any other differences between these two versions, exept for 'code improvements'.[/b]

People say that the DOS version doesn't matter but in my experience it does matter. Up to v6 the backwards compatibility was exquisite of course, but with v7 (Win98 "restarting in DOS mode") some games stopped working. Not just a couple of games but quite a lot of them, at least in my old machine, I can't tell for others' machines. So if what you want is a DOS which will be compatible with your old games, go for v6. Of course you're limited to 2 Gb but there's no way you're going to need more in a DOS partition, is there? Otherwise you could enable more than one partition or move files to and from the FAT16 partition in Windows.

As for the changes between DOS v6 and v7 I know of a certain one. When I set up a DOS v6 partition in my old Win98 machine I encountered the problem of getting sound with a SBPCI128. Of course I used the SB16 emulation drivers that the card came with, and that Win98 used when booting DOS v7. But at first they didn't work, until I replaced the v6 EMM386.EXE with the v7 one. It was the only way the drivers worked and, even a DOS v6 with a v7 EMM386.EXE ran a lot of games which didn't run in DOS v7. So EMM386.EXE is different, but also surely MSDOS.SYS and IO.SYS. What I mean is that there's a different between DOS v6 and v7, not to talk about using FreeDOS and such.

[Morrin]

What is the dos that "comes with" windows95? I was thinking of maybe digging up my old PC, formatting and starting fresh.

[The Fifth Horseman]

I _think_ it's 7.1 . But you can install Win95 on the top of DOS 6.22 - IIRC it will automatically create a boot option to run that version of DOS.